Delphia
by Enigmatics
Summary: Sesshoumaru x Izayoi. How Sesshoumaru eventually became his own father. AU, but only if you squint hard enough. In-progress.


The things you don't buy, you pay for, his father tells Sesshoumaru on the day of his death. He's fitting himself in breast plate. It is not the last thing he says, but it is the last thing he says to his son.

There are only two types of women, his father says another time: those you make trouble for and those who make trouble for you.

Sesshoumaru never even got to tell him he was right. The only time his father was beholden to someone he died for it. The only time he fell in love it killed him.

...

When Jaken's grandsire brings the news, Sesshoumaru fancies that he can hear, already, the beginnings of the crumbling that will soon destroy the kingdom.

Sire? The youkai is asking him, and the hands tugging at Sesshoumaru's hakama are trembling. Sesshoumaru gets up and stands behind his chair, his claws puncturing the leather, as if expecting someone at the door.

It is the grandson who finds him saddling Ah-Un in the dark. The boy is mute with shock, and seems to have wandered over to Sesshoumaru not out of a desire for self-preservation, but because he doesn't know where else to go. Blood is spattered on his face.

Sesshoumaru-sama, they killed my father, he says.

Sesshoumaru hazes the animal forward with one hand and with the other hoists Jaken up by the scruff and drops him beside him on Ah-Un. _Go_, he breathes.

Behind them the city is being sacked. Through the night air he can smell offal and shit and sulfur. The sackers have breached the city walls and are murdering with great relish, while the conquered have begun dying noisily.

What disturbs him about those screams is how similar each one is to the next. Battle cry and death wail and whoop and groan and shriek, all of these seem to mingle and fuse into one immense orgy of war; all seem to partake of the same orgiastic impulse, as though death and pillaging and dying are part of rapture.

He should tell himself that he never enjoyed killing, but that is not entirely true.

They have not ridden more than a mile when Jaken begins to talk to himself. Jaken's the name, he's saying, so quietly a human would not have heard him. Sesshoumaru doesn't know who he's talking to.

When he looks back one last time, the gates are on fire. Beneath the portcullis, a burning mare and a burning rider exit silently from the flames and ride on, silent as revenants coming to exact the souls of the damned, and the mare's cracked lips peeled back to the teeth in an awful parody of smiling and its eyes rolling as it flies past Ah-Un and the cart. Sesshoumaru has to dig his heel into the horse's flank to avoid colliding with it.

Jaken doesn't even notice. My haha-ue named me Jaken, the little demon is whispering. Father wanted to name me Jinro but she said she knew as soon as she saw me. Jaken, Jaken little Jaken, she used to sing. Without thinking he has been fingering the blood on his face, tracing it across his cheeks in squiggles and circles, painting his face into a Kabuki mask. In a few minutes, the blood will dry into a burgundy rust, and he will be ugly again.

Jaken, Jaken little Jaken.

They ride all night and they debouch in a copse of firs and they pretend to sleep on the hard packed earth. After a long time, Sesshoumaru can hear the strained, guttural sound of Jaken's crying.

...

They breakfast on vegetables from the palace gardens and a bear that Sesshoumaru kills. Jaken feeds little pieces to Ah-Un, laughing as the horse's tongue tickles his hand. All morning Sesshoumaru has been sitting crosslegged with his eyes closed and his ear to the ground, like a man auguring for water. When he rises gravely Jaken notices his feline eyes dilating.

Where are we going, milord? he asks.

To find my father's whore, Sesshoumaru says.

He does not tell Jaken that Izayoi is in the south, that he has heard in the distance the hoarse WhoOoo of battle horns and the stamping of a thousand feet. By now the minor lords have been dispatched from the north, each one of them promised a few square miles of his father's legacy if they kill him. It's almost too tantalizing for Seshoumaru.

He does not tell Jaken that he has been nursing a savage desire to turn back and meet Ryukotsusei's host. He would have dismissed the smaller youkai, uttered the empty, officious words, a quittance to your leal service, begone now little troglodyte and may death find you a long time from now. Then he would have rode jaunty and singleminded to his end.

He would be following in his father's footsteps.

That knowledge is what decides him against it in the end.

...

They travel south and watch as the plains turn to marshes and quagmires. It has been raining for days and sometimes early in the morning Jaken spies Sesshoumaru bathing with his kimono uncovered to his hips, a queer chrysalis, a man with nothing to his name anymore save his honor, which he seems to care nothing for. The sight of the kimono bobbing back and forth as the wind sculpts the lake, of Sesshoumaru's hair fanning out to points in the water, stirs something fugitive in Jaken's belly, he is embarrassed, he looks away.

The travel at night in total dark but for the occasional bivouac fire, the only one in sparse miles of grass and thicket and fir and hill and mountain, and it's like the first fire that ever was, yawing uncertainly as insects chirp and lesser youkai slink past the outer dark of the fire. Jaken babbles to Sesshoumaru about inane things. His master sits still and whets the blade of his katana, and stares into the fire as if it might give a portent of things forthcoming.

They travel through a flooded plain while the rain leaps up at them like stingers from the water. Sesshoumaru uncouples the cart and abandons it on the land and they sit Ah-Un and push off. All day they navigate between partially-submerged trees. Both sleep upright on their saddles.

At length they reach a small hamlet in a valley. A terrified innkeeper points trembling in the direction of the mountain, covering his eyes with the palm of his hand as though he's terrified of what he'll see, as though pointing to a woman who is already dead.

...

Izayoi's belly is flat. Sesshoumaru cannot believe his eyes. Rather than the swollen dugs and the litter in her womb, he finds her terrified, and quite barren. She does not open the door for him so he slices it through it, bar and all, and tears the two triangles of wood off their hinges. Inside she finds a girl in a filthy yukata, no more than sixteen, and at her feet the broken shards of a dish she had been eating porridge from. The broken porcelain is the most expensive thing in the room.

It's one of the few times he's dumbfounded. I did not expect—he begins to say, but her scream interrupts him. She has scuttled into a corner, and a yellow stain is darkening the lower portion of her yukata, the piss dribbling on the mud floor and steaming off her legs. When her eyes dart to the crescent moon on his head and she realizes who he is, his mouth narrows into a line.

Perhaps he should kill her. If not to reclaim some of his father's dubious honor, if not to remove any heirs which she does not have, which they had lied about, all of them had lied about, then he wants to do it simply because he would enjoy it.

(That is not entirely true, though. He wants to hurt her because she expected to be killed, she fears him like she fears an animal, and it shames him, he wants to punish her.)

He died, he says instead. His hands find his purse and take out a gold piece. He tosses it at her, not caring that she flinches, and beholds the doubloon gyring in the air in slow motion and its spangled light glancing off the walls and it lands spinning on the dirt.

Leave this place, he tells her, his kimono rustling softly as he turns. His scent now sticks to the walls and the dirt path leading to her door, and his enemies have very keen noses. Let her go on thinking what she will about him. Perhaps she's right.

Jaken is sitting behind one of the beast's heads when Sesshoumaru finds him. He has bathed in a stream and his ugly, horned head is clean. Milord? he asks, and something he sees makes his eyes widen. Sesshoumaru looks down. Venom has been dripping from his claws, corroding through the silk of his kimono and the flesh of his arms.

Are you all right, Sesshoumaru-sama? Jaken asks quietly.

The rumors were not true, he says. We are leaving.

They saddle and depart. On the road south, Jaken keeps looking back.

...

Sesshoumaru discovers that Jaken is smarter than he appears, perhaps very, very smart. He teaches the little demon how to play Go when they shelter at the manor of one of his father's vassals who managed to escape. The youkai has made peace with Ryukotsusei, and in his antechamber Sesshoumaru learns for the first time what it is to be looked down upon.

The two of them are ushered quickly into an empty room. There are pallets separated by a shoji screen and a common space where lie a squat table and two cushions. The Go board is laid out already.

He plays Jaken three times. He wins the first two games. While he plays, his ears are attuned to the smallest noise in the halls, the murmurous sound of an obi's being undone, the quiet consultation of the lord with his wife, the creak on wooden board, the steel of a wakizashi being unsheathed—

A wakizashi. Jaken saves him the trouble. Sesshoumaru-sama, I think they're plotting to kill us, he says.

Sesshoumaru looks at him fully for the first time.

How do you know? he asks.

They put us in one of the manor's central rooms. On our way in here, I saw a total of eight pairs of guards. They wanted us to think it's a guest room that is barely used, when really it's one of the best guarded in the house.

That is what I think as well, he tells Jaken. Yet can you be sure?

Jaken shakes his head. But you can, he says, and smiles. Sesshoumaru looks down. Jaken has just won the third game.

This is the fifth time we've played this configuration, he says. All other times you did the same thing and I let you, but this time you were too distracted by something. I saw your ears prick up.

He clears the board and begins placing only black Go pieces on the board, and two white ones. I think this is the layout, of the house, he says. We are here.

There is a rapping on the wood frame of their door.

Their swords would leave a silhouette against the shoji, Jaken whispers. Instead of giving themselves away, they are standing around the corner and knocking on the doorframe.

Sesshoumaru points slowly to his own back.

Just a second, Jaken says too loudly, nodding. He climbs onto Sesshoumaru's back. Milord is very tired, he says, cupping his hands around his mouth. He is sleeping right now. Come back later, if you please.

When they rush the door the first soldier does not see Sesshoumaru, who has been crouching. He decapitates the youkai with an upward swing of his katana. Two large ropes of black blood leap from the corpse's neck and it crumples; the head thuds on the wood and traces a centripetal arc around the axis of its neck before coming to rest face down in its own depleting blood.

By then the second soldier has swung at Sesshoumaru, torn off a section of his kimono, and tripped. He goes down on one knee as Sesshoumaru stabs him through the cheek, the blade exiting the posterior cranium; when the sword is retracted, two thin fans of blood spurt from the wounds and paint the shoji screens red.

Outside, the other guards have noticed that something is amiss. As they are approaching the room in rows of two, signaling to each other, Sesshoumaru has already stropped the blade of his katana on the robe of the deceased and sheathed it. The siding of the manor is wood, but close to the center, as Jaken noted.

It will be quicker to reach the very central cloister, says Jaken. The rooms in this area of the house seem to all border a larger, square room. But I don't think it's a room. I believe that there is a garden or an open terrace at the very center of the manor, that we couldn't see from without.

Sesshoumaru walks to the far wall and jabs through it and peels back a large block of wood and mortar. Outside, sunlight.

The remaining guards find the room empty save for the dead in their coagulating blood. When they look through the hole, Sesshoumaru has already scaled the manor walls and dropped to the grasslands outside, Jaken clinging to his neck.


End file.
